Beschreibung:

Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild 1977 oil on canvas 200 x 300 cm (78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in) Signed and dated ‘Richter 1977’ on the reverse.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Private Collection, Germany Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York Private Collection Exhibited Berlin, Haus am Waldsee, On the Trail: Stober Collection, 12 September – 1 November 1987 London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Gerhard Richter Abstract Paintings, 14 March – 22 April 1979 Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Gerhard Richter Schilderijen / Paintings, 8 October – 05 November 1978 Düsseldorf, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Gerhard Richter 22 October – 22 November 1977 Literature J. Harten, K-H. Hering, et.al., Gerhard Richter Bilder = Paintings 1962 – 1985, Cologne, 1986, p. 388 (mentioned), p. 209 (illustrated in colour) A. Rorimer, D. Zacharopoulos, Gerhard Richter Paintings, Marian Goodman Gallery/Sperone Westwater, New York, 1987, p. 6 (mentioned) B. Buchloh, ed., Gerhard Richter Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné 1962–1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, no. 429 (illustrated in colour) D. Elger, Gerhard Richter Maler, Cologne, 2002, pp. 295, 296, 451 (mentioned) E. Kiffl, R. Buschmann, et.al., Inside the Studio. Erika Kiffl fotografiert Gerhard Richter Cologne, 2008, p. 9 (mentioned), pp. 64, 66 (illustrated) H. Friedel, R. Storr, Gerhard Richter Rot-Gelb-Blau. Die Gemälde für BMW, Munich, 2011, p. 102 (illustrated in colour) Catalogue Essay “It’s not that I’m always thinking about how to make something timeless, it’s more of a desire to maintain a certain artistic quality that moves us, that goes beyond what we are, and that is, in that sense, timeless.” GERHARD RICHTER “Art is the highest form of hope.” GERHARD RICHTER “A lot of people find other mediums more attractive – put a screen in a museum and nobody wants to look at paintings any more. But painting is my profession, because it has always been the thing that interested me most. And now I’m of a certain age, I come from a different tradition and, in any case, I can’t do anything else. I’m still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that makes sense, that stays with us, as something human.” (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Nicolas Serota, Sprint 2011, quoted in M. Godfrey and N. Serota, eds., Gerhard Richter | Panorama, London, 2011, p. 15) Abstraktes Bild, painted in 1977, belongs to a body of work by Gerhard Richter known as Soft Abstracts in which the artist explores the idea of a ‘blown-up’, the enlarged, zoomed-in image that is familiar from examining a painting up close or inspecting the surface through a magnifying glass. The artist projected enlarged photographs of variously coloured brushstrokes and copied the images onto the canvases creating abstract images as a result. The Soft Abstracts series was a continuation of Details, an earlier series of works made in 1970, in which Richter painted details of thick oil paint, extrapolating them in size to fill the large canvases. The effect of the blown-up image in Abstraktes Bild is not simply the increase in size, but the transformation of the identity of the initial reference image and the subsequent impact on the viewer. Richter explains the objective of the enlargement in a letter to Benjamin Buchloh in the same year the present lot was created: “The outsize Blown-Up, which allows you to cheat, is for the time being the only form that can make real and comprehensible the ‘message’ that I want to present as fascinatingly as possible” (M. Godfrey, N. Serota, ed., Gerhard Richter | Panorama, p. 126). The Soft Abstracts were a bridge towards his later ‘free’ abstract paintings at which point the artist had ceased to use photographs as a starting point and began to employ a squeegee to drag the paint across the surface creating giant brushstrokes. In Abstraktes Bild, Richter uses pastel blues and yellows to create soft geometrical shapes that flow in and out of each other resulting in a fluid composition of immense atmospheric quality, half way between a landscape painting and an abstraction. The present l